Letters - Letter to the Editor

"Living Memorials" after the Civil War

I recently read with interest Andrew M. Shanken's revealing and timely (given 9/11) examination of memorials during World War II ("Planning Memory: Living Memorials in the United States during World War II," Art Bulletin 84 [2002]: 130-47). While discussion focuses on the war years (especially World War II), later in the article Shanken suggests that the idea of what he terms "living memorials" may stem from Reconstruction "or even earlier." It is on this point that I offer some evidence.

Just months after Appomattox, a lengthy piece entitled "Something about Monuments" appeared in the Nation (1, no. 5 [Aug. 3, 1865]: 154-56). The unsigned essay has relevance here because of its dismissal of conventional forms of monuments--the obelisk and "portrait statuary"--in favor of buildings.

A good building thus serving each present generation, and full of memories of a past generation of heroes; greeting every graduate who enters to share in literary or social festivity with welcome from a noble past; holding up, within and without, the names, to honor, of good men and true who have gone before--such a building would certainly be better than any huge pile erected to memory only.

A successful edifice, the essay concludes, must be fine and "noble," "rich and ornamental," and "built to last forever." Only then may it worthily serve "each present generation" as a "memorial building" or "living memorial," to repeat Shanken's phrase.

While Frederick Law Olmsted has been cited as the probable author (Peter G. Meyer, ed., Brushes with History: Writing on Art from "The Nation," 1865-2001 [New York: Thunder's Mouth Press/Nation Books, 2001], xxii), Harvard Professor Charles Eliot Norton seems more likely because the essayist is clearly aware of projections for Harvard University's Memorial Hall, and besides, Olmsted was in California until October 22, 1865 (David Schuyler and Jane Turner Censer, eds., The Papers of Frederick Law Olmsted, vol. 6 [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992], 200). Norton gives his notions wider application by citing Yale University's plans to construct an addition to its University Chapel and, more significantly, makes reference to ongoing conversations about "memorial buildings" in post--Civil War United States. Of structures proposed, he assumes that half "which unite a practical use with their monumental purpose" will be realized within the next few years. A number is not stated, hut no matter. The fact is that usefulness is part of the debate about commemoration directly after the trauma of the Civil War. The Nation's essay thus proves that consideration of "living memorials" did begin far earlier than World War II, in fact, by 1865, in reaction to the United States' first experience with "modern war."

LUCRETIA GIESE

Department of Art and Architectural History Rhode Island School of Design

2 College Street

Providence, R.I. 02903

Response

Many thanks to Professor Giese for offering textual evidence to confirm the expectation that concern for living memorials ran through commemorative debates after the Civil War. I recently stumbled across architectural evidence in the form of the Madison Township Soldiers and Sailors Memorial in Mansfield, Ohio, a museum erected in 1888 "in memory of the soldiers-sailors and the marines of all wars." The living memorial shows that Norton's interest in useful memorials was not completely drowned out by the profusion of bronze soldiers on plinths so often associated with the Civil War.

ANDREW M. SHAKEN

Department of Art Oberlin College

Oberlin, Ohio 44074

A Question of Origins

In his review of my book Dominion of the Eye (Art Bulletin 84 [2002]: 170-72) Paolo Berdini alleges a number of omissions. This is, of course, what reviewers often do, and previously I have never written a response to a review of any of my books. One of Berdini's allegations, however, is rather more of a problem; it raises a troubling issue of intellectual property, as I will demonstrate within the short space of this letter.

The matter concerns a turning point in European art history: the invention of linear perspective by Filippo Brunelleschi in two lost panels, respectively depicting the Baptistery and the Piazza della Signoria, believed to have been the basis of Alberti's codification of the new perspectival practice in Della pittura. A principal result of my recent work has been the proposal of a new origin story for this Renaissance invention, discovering in trecento urbanism important roots of the pictorial turn of Brunelleschi/Alberti. This idea was first mooted in my article of 1988 "What Brunelleschi Saw: Monument and Site at the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence," Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians; and it was further advanced in "Trecento Urbanism and the Origins of Linear Perspective," paper given (and circulated) at the conference "Linear Perspective: The First One Hundred Years" at MIT in 1995 (both cited in appropriate points in the hook, including the bibliography; the latter is forthcoming). The importa nce of this theme to Dominion of the Eye is implicit in the title. The theme of visuality, of the perspectival, scopic regime of trecento Florence is the center of the book, developed not only through the analysis of perspectival views in piazzas but also taking up most of the longest section (part 4, 92 pages), which concerns the way perspective, the studied role of the beholder, deeply structures all the trecento arts, including architecture, painting, and sculpture. The book also proposes a common grounding of the trecento piazza and Albertian/Brunelleschian perspective--a genealogical linkage--in the medieval (antique-derived) optical model of the "pyramid of vision" (232-39). The linkage of trecento urbanism and Renaissance perspective is also made graphically in the last three images of the book, which juxtapose on one page the trecento view of the Baptistery, the Urbino panel, and Pienza (282). Regarding the problem in Berdini's review, however, the key text of Dominion of the Eye comes on pp. 52-54 (w ith relevant illustrations):